Poker Tournaments, Cash Games or SNGs

There are many choices available to the No Limit Hold’em player in terms of the type of game to play poker in. Typically however, the optimal play style differs between these various game types. As such, it is best advised to specialise in one particular area. But choosing which area to specialise in can be the difficulty! Below I will highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the various game types available to the No Limit Hold’em Player.

Tournament Poker

A lot of people start out playing poker on the internet after watching the game being played on TV. And the highlight on many poker players calendar is the World Series of Poker every year. This is a tournament series whereby for a specific buy-in players get given chips and fight it out on the felt until there is just one man left standing. Coupled with the millions of $’s in prize money, this makes pretty entertaining viewing. Tournament poker in itself has a series of good and bad points to it.

The Benefits:
• For a small buy-in, one can generate huge profits for winning
• The competitive aspect of winning and knocking out other players from the tournament
• The changing dynamics of the game as the prize money gets near and the blinds increase make the game more varied and interesting
• Typically, tournaments have softer playing fields. This means that the average quality of play when compared to a cash game of a similar buy-in level is much weaker.

The Disadvantages:
• Tournaments can often take several hours to complete. It’s much harder to just play for the occasional hour as you may have to dedicate your whole evening if you want to reach the final table.
• As the blinds get higher, typically there becomes less post-flop play as the action changes towards more going all in preflop. Some prefer the increased gamble in this style of play whilst others prefer to out-smart their opponents once they’ve seen the flop.
• Due to the nature of tournaments, it is quite possible to go several tournaments without cashing for any money at all, due purely to bad luck!

Cash Games

Online cash games can vary immensely from the micro stakes of 1cent/2cent games for beginners to the monstrous nose-bleed stakes of $4000/$8000 for the top professionals in the world. Typically, one would buy-in for an amount and wager real money on their hands. This was the traditional way poker was played and still has a very strong fan-base today with literally thousands of tables available 24 hours a day at a huge variety of different stakes.

The Benefits:
• The flexibility that playing cash games bring has to be one of the biggest advantages of this form of poker. Due to the games running 24 hours a day, you can be sure to find a game whenever you fancy playing and for however long you want to play. Unlike tournament poker, you can stop playing whenever you want and leave the tables with your new found profits.
• The attraction of playing with real money for some is the sole-attraction for choosing cash games over tournament play.
• Cash game poker has a much greater reliance on post-flop play. This is when you can see the community cards (flop, turn and river). This is due to players typically having a much greater stack-to-blind ratio. This in turn allows much greater manoeuvrability and greater chance of out-playing your opponent.

The Disadvantages:
• Cash games are often tougher to beat and have much stronger opponents than the sit-n-go and tournament alternatives.
• Players that come from a tournament or SNG background often complain as well that cash poker is more of a “grind”. This is due to the stagnant conditions where the blinds don’t change and everything just seems same-old after a while.
• Unlike tournament or sit-n-go poker, you can keep topping up your stack which can become very costly if you’re not keeping track of how much money you are playing with!

Sit-N-Go Poker

Sit-n-go’s, often abbreviated to SNG’s, are similar to tournament poker, however in the majority of cases only consist of one table of players. For instance, on most poker sites, SNG’s are 9-person tournaments played on a single table with the top 3 players paid. There are a series of advantages and disadvantages to this game type:

The Benefits:
• With play similar to tournaments, but only lasting a fraction of the time, this is the perfect solution to players which seek the action of a tournament but have a busy life-style which makes it difficult to put in the long hours that large-field tournaments require.
• Similarly to tournaments, the changing dynamics and watching as the other players on the table get knocked out around you make this game-style very fun to play.
• SNG’s have lower variance than most other types of poker. This is due to the higher % of players that get paid and the smaller field size, meaning to get into the money you have less “all-in” situations where your stack is at risk.

The disadvantages:
• Unlike tournaments though, first place is usually paid 4.5x the buy-in, so you won’t ever get that huge-score which tournaments can offer.
• SNG’s often have less chips than the other forms of poker, which on one hand means the games don’t last very long, but on the other hand, means that play can become limited as the blinds inevitably increase.
• If you do manage to work your way up the stakes successfully, there is only a limited number of high stakes SNG’s that run. SNG’s are much more popular at the lower stakes.

I would advice anybody that is trying to decide which type of game they want to play to first just try them all out and play whichever game you find most enjoyable. Once you have identified which particular variety interests you the most, then specialise and get used to how the game plays to ensure you become a solid winning player as you move up the stakes. It is best not to mix-and-match the different disciplines at first due to the different optimal play styles required. But whichever form of poker you are interested in and pursue, I wish you the best of luck on the felt!

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